"I worry. I can't help but worry. It's too basic to me."
"You—worry about it."
Grant gave a small, melancholy lift of the brows, and seemed to ponder for a moment, raking a hand through his hair. "I think she asked something that jolted me—deep. I think I know where. I think she asked about my tape—which, admittedly, I have a small guilt about: I don't use it the way I'm supposed to; I think she asked about contact with subversives; and I dream about Winfield, lately. The whole scene out at Big Blue. The plane, and the bus with those men, and that room. . . ."
"Why didn't you tell me that?"
"Are dreams abnormal?"
"Don't give me that. Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because it's not significant. Because I know—when I'm not fluxed—that I'm all right. You want me to take the tape, I'll take it. You want to run a probe of your own—do it. I've certainly no apprehensions about that. Maybe you should. It's been a long time. Maybe I'd even feel safer if you did. —If,"
Grant added with a little tilt of the head, a sidelong glance, a laugh without humor. "If I didn't then wonder if youweren't off. You see? It's a mental trap."
"Because you got a chance to see Jordan. Because the damn place is crazy!" Of a sudden he felt a rush of frustration, an irrational concern so intense he got up and paced the length of the living room, looked back at Grant in a sudden feeling of walls closing in, of life hemmed around and impeded at every turn.
Not true, he thought. Things were better. Never mind that it was another year of separation from his father, another year gone, things no different than they had ever been—things were better in prospect, Ari was closer than she had ever been to taking power in her own right, and her regime, he sincerely believed it—promised change, when it would come.
They're burying Giraud today.
Why in hell does that make me afraid?
"I wish," Grant said, "you'd listened to me. I wish you'd gone to Planys instead."
"What difference? We'd have still been separate. We'd still worry—"
"What then? What's bothering you?"
"I don't know." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Being pent up in here, I think. This place. This—" He thought of a living room in beige and blue; and realized with a little internal shift-and-slide that it was not Jordan's apartment that had come back with that warm little memory. "God. You know where I wish we could go back to? Ourplace. The place—" Face in a mirror, not the one he had now. The boy's face. Seventeen and innocent, across the usual clutter of bottles on the bathroom counter, getting ready for an evening—
Tape-flash, ominous and chaotic. The taste of oranges.
"—before all this happened. That's useless, isn't it? I don't even want to be that boy. I only wish I was there knowing what I know now."
"It was good there," Grant said.
"I was such a damned fool."
"I don't think so."
Justin shook his head.
"I know differently," Grant said. "Put yourself in Ari's place. Wonder—what you would have been—on her timetable, with her advantages, with the things they did to her— You'd have been—"
"Different. Harder. Older."
"—someone else. Someone else entirely. CITs are such a dice-throw. You're so unintentionally cruel to each other."
"Do you think it's necessary? Can't we learn without putting our hand in the fire?"
"You're asking an azi, remember?"
"I'm askingan azi. Is there a way to get an Ariane Emory out of that geneset—or me—out of mine—"
"Without the stress?" Grant asked. "Can flux-states be achieved intellectually—when they have endocrine bases? Can tape-fed stress—short of the actual chance of breaking one's neck—be less real, leave less pain—than the real experience? What if that tape Ari made—were only tape? What if it had never happened—but you thought it had? Would there be a difference? What if Ari's maman had never died, but she thought she had? Would she be sane? Could she trust reality? I don't know. I truly don't know. I would hate to discover that everything until now—was tape; and I was straight from the Town, having dreamed all this."
"God, Grant!"
Grant turned his left wrist to the light, where there was always, since the episode with Winfield and the Abolitionists, a crosswise scar. "This is real. Unless, of course, it's only something my makers installed with the tape."
"That's not good for you."
Grant smiled. "That's the first time in years you've called me down. Got you, have I?"
"Don't joke like that."
"I have no trouble with reality. I knowtape when I feel it. And remember I'm built right side up, with my logic sets where they belong, thank you, my makers. But flux is too much like dreams. Tape-fed flux—would have no logical structure. Tape-fed flux is too much like what Giraud did in the War, which I don't even like to contemplate—building minds and unbuilding them; mindwiping and reconstruction . . . always, always, mind you, with things the subject can't go back to check; and a lot left to the imagination. I honestly don't know, Justin. If there's a key to taping those experiences— Giraudcould have had some insight into it, isn't that irony?"
It made some vague, bizarre sense, enough to send another twitch down his back, and a feeling of cold into his bones.
"Talking theory with Giraud—" But Giraud was dead. And yet-to-be. "It wasn't something we ever got around to."
"The question is, essentially, whether you can substitute tape for reality. I'm very capable, Justin; but I sweated blood on that flight to Planys, I was so damned helpless during the whole trip. That'swhat you give up: survivability in the real world."
Justin snorted. "You think I don't worry."
"But you could learn muchmore rapidly. Back to the old difference: you flux-learn; I logic my way through. And no aggregate of CITs is logical. Got you again."
Justin thought about it; and smiled finally, in the damnable gray apartment, in the elegant prison Ari appointed them. For a moment it felt like home. For a moment he remembered that it was safer than anywhere they had been since that fondly-remembered first apartment.
Then the apprehension came back again, the great stillness over Reseune, deserted halls, everything in flux.
There was sudden break-up on the vid, the news commentary thrown off in mid-word.
The Infinite Man appeared on screen. Music played. One never worried about such things. Someone kicked a cable, and Reseune's whole vid-system glitched.
Except it was also something Reseune Security did, for selected apartments, selected viewers.
My God,he thought, a sudden rush of worry, lifelong habit. Were they monitoring? Have they gotten through her security? What could they have heard?
vi
"Uncle Denys," Ari had relayed on the way, via Base One and Catlin's com unit, "I need to talk to you right away."
"Lab office," Seely had relayed back.
Shocked looks followed them through the labs from the time they had entered, techs who knew that things were already Odd with Denys, azi who were reading the techs if not the situation, and worried as hell; and now an unexplained break-in of conspicuous Family coming straight from the funeral, in mourning, and headed for lab offices at high speed—small wonder the whole lab stopped and stared, Ari thought; and at least she could freely admit to knowing as much as she knew, excepting what Planys was doing.
Past the tanks, the techs, the very place where she had been born, where likely by now half a dozen Girauds were in progress—up the little stairs with the metal rail, to the small administrative office Denys had commandeered: Seely was evidently keeping a look-out through the one-way glass of the lab offices, because Seely opened the door to let them in before she had made the final turn of the steps.